Well versed in Victorian science

A Lear’s macaw, from Edward Lear’s Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, 1832

A
s the experimental physicist Robert Hunt declared in his Poetry of
Science; Or, Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature (1848), an
inspired meditation on the relations between science and poetry, “there are,
indeed, ‘tongues in trees’”. But, turning from Shakespeare to trees in the
world, he concluded, “science alone can interpret their mysterious whispers,
and in this consists its poetry”. Charles Dickens, reviewing the book with
enthusiasm in the Examiner, urged that it was for science to show
that its facts were “at least as full of poetry, as the most poetical
fancies ever founded on an imperfect observation and a distant suspicion of
them”.

That Victorian scientists were drawn to the world of literature is abundantly
clear. Darwin boarded the Beagle with Paradise Lost, though in
later life he would turn from poetry to novels, preferring happy endings and
pretty heroines, and plundering Gaskell, Dickens and others for examples of
the expression of the emotions. His protégé, the leading evolutionist George
Romanes, declared with excitement in 1878 in a postscript to Darwin: “I am
beginning to write poetry!” And his cousin Francis Galton, who later came up
with fingerprinting, regression to the mean and eugenics, would spout verse
as a child. Finding in The Origin of Species a boy’s adventure story,
some fifty years later he produced a novel, The Eugenic College of
Kantsaywhere, that was so bad, in all sorts of ways, that his niece
sensibly ordered that it be destroyed. Conversely, geology and the emerging
life sciences are interwoven into Tennyson’s In Memoriam, just
as George Eliot, Hardy and New Woman writers experimented with scientific
ideas in their fiction.

But while literary critics have been drawn by the appeal of science – in
particular the life sciences – to novelists and poets, or to ground shared
between literature and science, Daniel Brown, in The Poetry of Victorian
Scientists, has a different story to tell. Moving from the astronomer
William Rowan Hamilton and the nonsense writer Edward Lear to the physicist
James Clerk Maxwell and the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, he
explores ways in which a group of Victorian mathematical scientists put
poetry to work. Many of the witty and skilful poems that attract Brown’s
scholarly attention were written in response to contemporary scientific
debates, often inspired – or cranked up – by meetings of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science as it weaved its way through
British towns. Brown’s opening vignette is the friendship between Hamilton
and William Wordsworth. Wordsworth commented on his poems and, undoubtedly
for good reasons, tried to push him back to his science. Hamilton’s eventual
decision to choose science over poetry is for Brown emblematic of a
transition in British culture since science first began to put itself on a
professional footing in the 1830s. Half a century later, Hardy’s Lady
Constantine worries in Two on a Tower that her youthful astronomer
will become “a popular physicist” and attract a “newer and brighter wife” –
“popularity seems cooling towards art and coquetting with science
now-a-days”. In 1833, the Cambridge polymath William Whewell (who also wrote
poetry) coined the term “scientist”, though it wasn’t to catch on until the
rise of laboratory science at the end of the century. Brown sees the
decision of the British Association not to include literature among its
sections as marking a new separation between poetry and science. But a
natural kinship between poetry and science (embodied, respectively, as
beauty and truth in Hamilton’s “To Poetry”) belies such a separation, and
forms the central focus of Brown’s study.

Lear’s limericks take causality to levels of absurdity

Edward Lear was a proficient illustrator of natural history whose monograph, Illustrations
of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832), drawn from the parrots
at London Zoo, found immediate acclaim. Brown argues that his prints
participate in “an enlightenment science of reasonable literalness”, and
stresses the importance of the scientific meaning and currency of natural
history illustrations, as he finds in their rationalist commitments a
continuity with Lear’s nonsense work. With repetition rather than rhyme at
the end of the final line, his limericks mirror tautology in logic, as they
take causality to levels of absurdity – just one way in which nonsense
colludes with science against poetry. Like science itself, nonsense was an
affront to established ideas, and, as Brown notes, childhood experiences of
play laid the foundations for Lear’s and Hamilton’s scientific endeavours.
Lear’s limericks, accompanied by descriptive drawings, even gestured
playfully at early natural history texts where impressions sometimes
outweighed empirical evidence, with anthropomorphic characters standing in
for a species. But Lear is anomalous in a study of the poetry of scientists.
While through the precision of his drawings he inadvertently identified new
species (Lear’s Macaw and Lear’s Cockatoo), he is known for his poetry, not
his science (and for a more deliberate discovery of such new species as the
Moppsikon Floppsikon bear and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo). Brown rightly returns
attention to his insights as a natural history lithographer, but the chapter
sits oddly with the rest, which is focused on established scientists, and
raises questions about the overall aim of the work.

As Brown points out, physics and mathematics increasingly drew on the
imagination in the first half of the Victorian period. NonEuclidean geometry
affronted intuitive experience of space through the idea of four dimensions,
with the comic and absurd in Alice in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass correlating with new cosmologies. One of the most vexed
debates Brown addresses is the use of imagination in science. In the words
of the physicist John Tyndall, in his 1870 address to the British
Association, “imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical
discoverer”. Charging him with undermining modern scientific method, a
rivalrous P. G. Tait voiced concerns over the admission of imagination into
science in his anonymous “Imagination in Science”: “there is every prospect
that people whose imaginative faculty is stronger than their habit of
observation will give us all plenty to do”. A text which looms large in
several of Brown’s chapters, Maxwell’s “To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A
Tyndallic Ode”, published in Nature in 1871, undermined
Tyndall’s cosmology as one developed by analogy with human procreation,
parodying his attempt to bring disparate areas of his thought together
through the imagination: “then summon up your grasp of mind – / Your fancy
scientific, / That signs and sounds, with thoughts combined / May be of
truth prolific”. Likewise, Maxwell’s poem “Molecular Evolution” (1873), also
published in Nature, parodies Tyndall’s scientific materialism, as
“by a swift metamorphosis, / Wisdom turns wit, and science joke”. Attacking
the popularization of science, Maxwell mocks the physicist’s lectures as
self-promoting, ceaseless babbling.

In the final chapters, Brown turns from the punning Maxwell, his chief
protagonist, to James Joseph Sylvester, who used poetry to demonstrate his
theories in The Laws of Verse or Principles of Versification Exemplified
in Metrical Translations (1870), and brought together mathematics,
philosophy, prosody and poetry through a common concern with space.
Sylvester cited poetry in his lectures on mathematics, but also shared
concepts and terms between the two, drawing on mathematical idiom in his Laws
of Verse, with such terms as “syzygy” and “catalectic” moving
between prosodic and mathematical applications.

Minutely mapping disputes over the professionalization – and popularization –
of science, materialism, Euclidean and Riemannian geometries and the uses of
the imagination in science, Brown succeeds in demonstrating intricate
interrelations of science and poetry. His focus is an important one, and
certainly one that has been neglected, but whether strangely so is less
clear. There is a reason Brown’s subjects are remembered not for their
specialist poetry, but for their science (as Wordsworth sensed in the case
of Hamilton).

Daniel Brown bravely dispenses with an introduction and conclusion, but the
story he tells, clogged by microscopically close readings, is especially in
need of them. The range is both eclectic and narrow, much more so than the
title suggests, and would have benefited from a clearer treatment of broader
developments in Victorian scientific culture. The Poetry of Victorian
Scientists: Style, science and nonsense is original and erudite,
bringing welcome attention to the poetry of Victorian mathematicians and
physicists, but, deluged in detail, it is disappointingly less than the sum
of its parts.

Angelique Richardson is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Exeter. She is the author of Love and Eugenics in the Late
Nineteenth Century: Rational reproduction and the new woman, 2003, and
the editor of Women Who Did: Stories by men and women, 1890–1914,
2005, and After Darwin: Animals, emotions, and the mind, published
last year.

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